The La Tirana Solar project will be built in the Tarapacá region in northern Chile and requires an investment of around US$90 million. It will be equipped with 423,360 FS3 cadmium telluride thin film 90 watt PV modules supplied by First Solar.

The project will also involve installing a 66kV transmission line and substation to feed the output into the region’s electricity grid Northern Interconnected System (SING). Indeed, the project is expected to generate 90.34 GWh of electricity every year.

Construction of the facility is scheduled to begin in March 2013 and become operational in September 2013.

Looking back, 2014 was a year of convalescence for a PV industry still battered and bruised from a period of ferocious competition. End-market demand continued apace, with analysts towards the end of 2014 predicting the year would see between around 45 and 50GW of deployment. That has begun to feed through to the supplier end of the market, with all the main manufacturers announcing capacity expansions in 2015 and further ahead.

Although the past few years have proved extremely testing for PV equipment manufacturers, falling module prices have driven solar end-market demand to previously unseen levels. That demand is now starting to be felt by manufacturers, to the extent that leading companies are starting to talk about serious capacity expansions later this year and into 2015. This means that the next 12 months will be a critical period if companies throughout the supply chain are to take full advantage of the PV industry’s next growth phase.